28 June 2006

WASHINGTON - House Republicans intend to hold votes this summer and fall touching on abortion, guns, religion and other priority issues for social conservatives, part of an attempt to improve the party's prospects in the midterm elections.

The "American Values Agenda" also includes a proposed constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage — which already has failed in the Senate — a prohibition on human cloning and possibly votes on several popular tax cuts.

"Radical courts have attempted to gut our religious freedom and redefine the value system on which America was built. We hope to restore some of those basic values through passing this legislative agenda and renewing our country's commitment to faith, freedom and life," Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., said Tuesday.

The priorities are part of competing attempts by the two parties to appeal to target voters in the fall campaign, with control of the House and Senate at stake. It's unclear how many of these bills might clear Congress and reach President Bush's desk, given the controversy many will cause and the relatively short time remaining before the two-year Congress ends.(More)

I was stunned to see two consecutive articles actually calling out the GOP on their bald-faced legislative stunts designed to rally the Far Right and the Evangeliban. The traditional media was rousing from its slumber. (Or, alternately, the Republican schemes were growing too transparent even for their formerly willing patsies in the stenography journalism trade).

And then they threw in that last paragraph.

Whatever is happening, everybody's all about pandering all the time. Republicans are pushing a gay marriage ban, a flag burning amendment, a bill that mandates telling women that an abortion "will cause the unborn child pain," and further legislation about the Ten Commandments and the Pledge of Allegiance.

The Dems' attempts to "curry favor?" Legislation to raise the minimum wage for the first time in EIGHT YEARS, and a measure to add direct price negotiation to the administration's disasterous Medicare prescription drug plan.

THOSE are your (presumably equivalent) "competing plans to appeal to target voters."